


Snow Queen

by notquitenobody



Category: Frozen (2013)
Genre: Snow Queen - Freeform, elsa as the mythical snow queen, folk lore, legend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-22
Updated: 2017-06-22
Packaged: 2018-11-17 07:08:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11270544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notquitenobody/pseuds/notquitenobody
Summary: We speak as though love fixes everything. That it was an act of true love that melted Anna’s heart. That in knowing love, Elsa learned control. That love was able to cure even the coldest, most frozen of hearts.But what if that wasn’t enough.





	Snow Queen

We speak as though love fixes everything. That it was an act of true love that melted Anna’s heart. That in knowing love, Elsa learned control. That love was able to cure even the coldest, most frozen of hearts.

But what if that wasn’t enough.

We are talking about a girl with ice in her veins. Snow blooms under her every step and when she cries, it is not drops of water, but shards of ice that course down her cheeks.  
Arendelle is a land of warmth and heat. Winter comes, yes, but it passes too. Arendelle is her sister’s domain. Elsa no longer fits there. Instead, she moves away.

The north mountain becomes infamous throughout the land. On that mountain, the snow never shifts, the blizzards never leave and at the centre a castle stands, reflecting the light of a thousand sunbeams. It is a sight to behold, this frozen sculpture in the pale light of morning, the sun making the ice rainbows dance and the snow dazzle. Snow drifts pile up, as soft as silk and the frozen lakes glitter in the soft light of morning. The mountain is quiet, the only noises being the wail of the wind and occasionally, the absentminded singing of the castle’s only inhabitant.

They say that when the wind is just right, you can stand at the bottom of the mountain and hear her singing. They say her voice is the most beautiful in the land, a mix of agony and beauty – that no one has heard it and not been moved to tears.

It may be quiet on the mountain, but Elsa is not lonely. She wanders her domain, looking after the snow rabbits and foxes that she has created, the only set of footprints in a white kingdom. She checks her marshmallow guardians, as she has never forgotten the first time her domain was invaded.

She does not know what these powers are, nor where they came from, but she does know that she is alone in having them. A single, solitary ice queen in a kingdom of one. She isn’t lonely, but she is alone and sometimes her grief is so bad that the winds howl throughout the night and snow falls all across Arendelle, regardless of the season. 

There is beauty in her magic, and she sees this every day, but danger too and so she leaves the fallen chandelier on the floor of the ballroom, as a reminder that she is deadly.  
Her sister visits sometimes, when her schedule allows it and many years pass without event. It doesn’t take long for Elsa to notice that while her sister ages, she herself stays the same as when she first left Arendelle. Anna brings her children and then her grandchildren to meet the mysterious white haired lady that their mother/grandmother claims is her sister. Elsa never understood children, but enjoys their curiosity and unconditional acceptance of her.

(She never does magic in front of them.)

(She will never forgot what happened to her sister when they were children.)

But eventually, Anna’s hair is streaked with grey, her face creased with the lines of a good life and her step is slow and heavy. The journey to the North Mountain becomes harder and harder for her to make and eventually, she makes her last trip.

When Queen Anna died at the age of 92 there was such a storm on the North Mountain that the whole land was covered in snow for a month. The wind didn’t stop howling the whole time and if you listened closely, some say you could hear a woman crying.

Her sister’s funeral was the first and last time Elsa left the mountain for many, many years. Nobody knew what to make of this strange, pale, white-haired lady at the Queen’s funeral, but she was welcomed by the Crown Prince, who hugged her so fiercely that people wondered how he knew her.

She didn’t speak a word the whole day.

She didn’t speak again for many years.

An unknown number of years passed and each year, the ice in Elsa’s body crystallised further, turning a once beautiful girl into something ethereal and otherworldly. Her skin lightened to almost the shade of snow itself and her hair, once a pale blonde, became pure white. Her skin, always cool to the touch, became like ice.

She forgot what it was like to be human, for it was now well over a hundred years since she had left her childhood home. It no longer hurt to think of her sister, and for this she was glad.

Eventually, she began to travel. When deep winter set in each year, she would gather her cloak and set out, wandering the human world for a few months each year. Legend began to spread of a mythical woman in white, a woman whose eyes were like a winter storm and whose voice was like a glacier in spring. No one knew where she came from, or what she was, but all who had met her remembered it for the rest of their days. She rarely spoke but sometimes would sing, causing entire villages to stop in awe, to listen, enraptured, to this strange lady of ice, whose voice could start snowfalls and avalanches in distant mountains as she sang of ice and love and loss. 

As regal as a queen she wandered the world alone but, like clockwork, always retreated back to her icy palace at the first sign of spring.

Legend became myth, and myth became story. The story of the Snow Queen had many versions, all untrue. In one, she was a jilted lover who asked to have her heart frozen so she could not feel it. In another, she had been just a woman, originally, but a shard of ice in her heart turned her cold and unfeeling. And in another version, she was a queen from a far off land, betrayed and usurped of her throne and so banished to live her life in a frozen wasteland. 

The stories amused the Snow Queen, and she was particularly amused at how the versions that came closest to the truth were always the first to be disbelieved. She didn’t mind how people wanted to tell her story, for she was older than anyone dared to believe. She had seen the rise and fall of empires and she had seen wars and battles that threatened to tear the world apart. She had lived a thousand lifetimes, a living sculpture, with ice flowing freely through her veins and snow at her fingertips. She did not care what humans thought of her. She was long past caring what anyone thought of her. 

No one knows what happened to the Snow Queen. The stories never covered that. Some say that she is still out there, walking the world alone, a lonely white figure in a pale blue cloak. Others say she retreated to her palace, and continues to live out her life there, away from the rest of the world. And some say that one day, she just got tired, for she had lived too long. That one day, she relinquished the ice in her body, that the snow took back their Queen. That one day, she just ceased to exist as a creature. That she became the snow and ice that had been a part of her for her whole life. That she let go of the earth and became what she had always wanted – free. 

And some say that if you listen really closely to the wind, you can still hear her singing.


End file.
